The larger American Colonization Society was founded in 1816. It supported the settlement of thousands of free people of color to its colony of Liberia, in West Africa. There were also initially separate settlements founded by state colonization societies of Mississippi (Mississippi-in-Africa), Kentucky (Kentucky in Africa), Georgia,[3] Pennsylvania,[4] and Louisiana.[citation needed] A New Jersey colony was planned.[5]
In 1838, these African-American settlements were united into the Commonwealth of Liberia, which declared independence from the American Colonization Society on July 26, 1847. The Maryland colony remained separate from the Commonwealth of Liberia, as the colonization society wished to maintain its trade monopoly in the area. On February 2, 1841, Maryland-in-Africa became the Independent State of Maryland. Following an independence referendum in 1853, the state declared its independence on May 29, 1854, under the name Maryland in Liberia,[6] with its capital at Harper.
History
Map of Liberia in the 1830s, where the Republic of Maryland and other state-sponsored colonies are identified.
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816, in part due to alarms over the violence of the Haitian slave revolution and its aftermath, which resulted in independence for that country in 1804. Fears were raised about the effects of emancipation of slaves in the United States.[7]
In this period, both slaveholders and abolitionists collaborated on the project to transport free blacks to Africa, though for different reasons. They suggested it was "repatriation", but by this time most African Americans were native-born in the United States, and said they were no more African than the Americans are British. Slaveholders believed that free blacks threatened the stability of their slave societies. Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831 panicked Southerners, who feared another slave uprising and seizure of the country, as had recently happened in Haiti. Abolitionists, many of them ministers, hoped to persuade slaveholders through their religion to manumit (free) their slaves and also worried about the discrimination faced by free blacks in the United States.
Those who supported relocation to West Africa believed (or said they believed) that the African Americans would create there better polities; first as some vague type of colonies, then countries, away from white prejudice, discrimination, and economic exploitation. While thousands of free blacks did relocate to the colonies, most free African Americans opposed this project, claiming the right of their birth in the United States and wanting to improve their lives there.[8]
The U.S. state of Maryland had an increasing proportion of free blacks among its African-American population. During the first two decades after the American Revolution, about 25% of blacks were freed, in part because slaveholders were inspired by the war's ideals. Practically, changing labor needs meant that fewer slaves were required.[9][pageneeded] By 1810 some 30% of northern Maryland's blacks were free, in what was a more urbanized region, but so were 20% of blacks in the southern part of the state.[9]:291 In the next two decades the number of free blacks increased markedly in the northern part of the state, and many congregated in Baltimore, the state's and the South's largest city.[9][pageneeded] By 1830 Maryland had a total of 52,938 free blacks: 51.3% of blacks in northern Maryland were free, and the black population of Baltimore was 75% free. In southern Maryland, free blacks made up 24.7% of the black population.[9][pageneeded]
The Maryland State Colonization Society was originally a branch of the American Colonization Society, which had founded the colony of Liberia at Monrovia on January 7, 1822. The Maryland Society decided to establish a new settlement of its own to accommodate its emigrants and with the intention of controlling trade to its colony. In December 1831, the Maryland state legislature in the United States appropriated US$10,000 for 26 years to transport 10,000 free blacks and ex-slaves, and 400 Caribbean slaves from the United States and the Caribbean islands, respectively, to Africa. It founded the Maryland State Colonization Society for this purpose.[10] Nowhere near that number were actually transported.
The first area in the future Republic of Maryland to be settled by the Maryland Colonization Society was Cape Palmas, in 1834, somewhat south of the rest of the American colony.[1] The Cape is a small, rocky peninsula connected to the mainland by a sandy isthmus. Immediately to the west of the peninsula is the estuary of the Hoffman River. Approximately 21km (15mi) along the coast to the east, the Cavalla River empties into the sea, marking the border between Liberia and the Ivory Coast. It marks the western limit of the Gulf of Guinea, according to the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO).
Most of the settlers were freed African-American slaves and freeborn African Americans primarily from the state of Maryland.[11][pageneeded] The Colonization Society organizers thought they could establish new trading ties by relocating African Americans to West Africa. The colony was named Maryland in Africa (also known as Maryland in Liberia) on February 12, 1834.
John Brown Russwurm
John Brown Russwurm, first mixed-race governor of Maryland in Africa (1836–1851).
In 1836 the Colonization Society appointed its first mixed-race governor, John Brown Russwurm (1799–1851), who served as governor for more than a dozen years, until his death. Russwurm encouraged the immigration of African Americans to Maryland in Africa, and supported agriculture and trade.[12] He had begun his career working as the colonial secretary for the American Colonization Society between 1830 and 1834. He also worked as the editor of the Liberia Herald. He resigned this post in 1835 to protest America's colonization policies.
In 1838, a number of other American settlements on the west coast of Africa united to form the Commonwealth of Liberia, which declared its independence on July 26, 1847.
Two American visitors in 1851 reported the population of "Maryland in Liberia" to be between 900 and 1,000, with four churches and six schools.[13]
The colony of Maryland in Liberia remained independent, as the Maryland State Colonization Society wished to maintain its trade monopoly in the area. On February 2, 1841, Maryland-in-Africa declared its statehood and became the State of Maryland. In 1847 the Maryland State Colonization Society published the Constitution and Laws of Maryland in Liberia, based on the United States Constitution.
Declaration of Independence, and annexation by Liberia
On May 29, 1854, the State of Maryland declared its independence, naming itself Maryland in Liberia,[6] with its capital at Harper. It was also known as the Republic of Maryland. It held the land along the coast between the Grand Cess and San Pedro rivers. It lasted three years as an independent state.
Soon afterward, local tribes, including the Grebo and the Kru, attacked the State of Maryland. Unable to maintain its own defense, Maryland appealed for help to Liberia, its more powerful neighbor. President Roberts sent military assistance, and an alliance of Marylanders and Liberian militia troops successfully repelled the local tribesmen. The Republic of Maryland recognized that it could not survive as an independent state, and following a referendum, Maryland was annexed by Liberia on April 6, 1857, becoming known as Maryland County.
↑ Geggus, David (2017), Eltis, David; Richardson, David; Drescher, Seymour; Engerman, Stanley L. (eds.), "Slavery and the Haitian Revolution", The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 4: AD 1804–AD 2016, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol.4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.321–343, ISBN978-0-521-84069-9, retrieved June 15, 2022
↑ Fuller Jr, Thomas; Janifer, Benjamin (1852) [December 17, 1851], "Mressrs. Fuller and Janifer's Report", Thirty-fifth annual report of the American Colonization Society: with the proceedings of the Board of Directors and of the Society, and the addresses delivered at the annual meeting, January 20, 1852: to which is added an appendix, containing information about going to Liberia; things which every emigrant ought to know; Messrs. Fuller and Janifer's report, and a table of emigrants, Washington, D.C.: American Colonization Society, pp.44–48, at p. 46
The flag of Liberia or the Liberian flag, sometimes called the Lone Star, bears a close resemblance to the flag of the United States, representing Liberia's founding by former black slaves from the United States and the Caribbean. They are both part of the stars and stripes flag family.
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the repatriation of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa. It was modeled on an earlier British Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor's colonization in Africa, which had sought to resettle London's "black poor". Until the organization's dissolution in 1964, the society was headquartered in Room 516 of the Colorado Building in Washington, D.C.
Joseph Jenkins Roberts was an American merchant who emigrated to Liberia in 1829, where he became a politician. Elected as the first (1848–1856) and seventh (1872–1876) president of Liberia after independence, he was the first man of African descent to govern the country, serving previously as governor from 1841 to 1848. He later returned to office following the 1871 Liberian coup d'état. Born free in Norfolk, Virginia, Roberts emigrated as a young man with his mother, siblings, wife, and child to the young West African colony. He opened a trading firm in Monrovia and later engaged in politics.
Maryland County is a county in the southeastern portion of Liberia. One of 15 counties that comprise the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has two districts. Harper serves as the capital with the area of the county measuring 887 square miles (2,300 km2). As of the 2022 Census, it had a population of 172,202, making it the ninth most populous county in Liberia.
Ralph Randolph Gurley was an American clergyman, an advocate of the separation of the races, and a major force for 50 years in the American Colonization Society. It offered passage to free black Americans to the ACS colony in west Africa. It bought land from chiefs of the indigenous Africans. Because of his influence in fundraising and education about the ACS, Gurley is considered one of the founders of Liberia, which he named.
Robert Finley was an American Presbyterian clergyman and educator who is known as one of the founders of the American Colonization Society, which established the colony of Liberia in West Africa as a place for free African Americans.
Harper, situated on Cape Palmas, is the capital of Maryland County in Liberia. It is a coastal town situated between the Atlantic Ocean and the Hoffman River. Harper is Liberia's 11th largest town, with a population of 17,837.
Cape Palmas is a headland on the extreme southeast end of the coast of Liberia, Africa, at the extreme southwest corner of the northern half of the continent. The Cape itself consists of a small, rocky peninsula connected to the mainland by a sandy isthmus. Immediately to the west of the peninsula is the estuary of the Hoffman River. Approximately 21 km (15 mi) further along the coast to the east, the Cavalla River empties into the sea, marking the border between Liberia and the Côte d'Ivoire. It marks the western limit of the Gulf of Guinea, according to the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO).
Freedom's Journal was the first African American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. John Wilk and other free Black men in New York City, it was published weekly starting with the March 16, 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal was superseded in 1829 by The Rights of All, published between 1829 and 1830 by Samuel Cornish, the former senior editor of the Journal. The View covered it as part of Black History Month in 2021.
Lott Cary was an African-American Baptist minister and lay physician who was a missionary leader in the founding of the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa in the 1820s. He founded the first Baptist church in 1822, now known as Providence Baptist Church of Monrovia. He served as the colony's acting governor from August 1828 to his death in November that year.
John Brown Russwurm was a Jamaican-born American abolitionist, newspaper publisher, and colonist of Liberia, where he moved from the United States. He was born in Jamaica to an English father and enslaved mother. As a child he traveled to the United States with his father and received a formal education, becoming the first black person to graduate from Hebron Academy and Bowdoin College.
Mississippi-in-Africa was a colony on the Pepper Coast founded in the 1830s by the Mississippi Colonization Society of the United States and settled by American free people of color, many of them former slaves. In the late 1840s, some 300 former slaves from Prospect Hill Plantation and other Isaac Ross properties in Jefferson County, Mississippi, were the largest single group of emigrants to the new colony. Ross had freed the slaves in his will and provided for his plantation to be sold to pay for their transportation and initial costs.
The back-to-Africa movement was a political movement in the 19th and 20th centuries advocating for a return of the descendants of African American slaves to the African continent. The movement originated from a widespread belief among some European Americans in the 18th and 19th century United States that African Americans would want to return to the continent of Africa. In general, the political movement was an overwhelming failure; very few former slaves wanted to move to Africa. The small number of freed slaves who did settle in Africa—some under duress—initially faced brutal conditions, due to diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance. As the failure became known in the United States in the 1820s, it spawned and energized the radical abolitionist movement. In the 20th century, the Jamaican political activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, members of the Rastafari movement, and other African Americans supported the concept, but few actually left the United States.
Hilary Teague, sometimes written as Hilary Teage, was a Liberian merchant, journalist, and politician in the early years of the West African nation of Liberia. A native of the state of Virginia in the United States, he was known for his oratory skills and was prominent in early Liberian colonial politics. A leading advocate for Liberian independence from the American Colonization Society, he drafted the Liberian Declaration of Independence in 1847, serving as both a senator and the first Secretary of State for the new nation in the years that followed.
The Maryland State Colonization Society was the Maryland branch of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 with the purpose of returning free African Americans to what many Southerners considered greater freedom in Africa. The ACS helped to found the colony of Liberia in 1821–22, as a place for freedmen. The Maryland State Colonization Society was responsible for founding the Republic of Maryland in West Africa, a short lived independent state that in 1857 was annexed by Liberia. The goal of the society was "to be a remedy for slavery", such that "slavery would cease in the state by the full consent of those interested", but this end was never achieved, and it would take the outbreak of the Civil War to bring slavery to an end in Maryland.
Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined in Maryland as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market for cash crops was strong in Europe. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as England's economy improved, fewer came to the colonies. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.
The Liberian Declaration of Independence is a document adopted by the Liberian Constitutional Convention on 26 July 1847, to announce that the Commonwealth of Liberia, a colony founded and controlled by the private American Colonization Society, was an independent state known as the Republic of Liberia.
The African Civilization Society (ACS) was an American Black nationalist organization founded by Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany in New York City to serve African Americans. Founded in 1858 in response to the 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford and a series of national events in the 1850s which negatively impacted African Americans, its mission was to exercise African-American self-determination by establishing a colony of free people of color in Yorubaland. Additionally, the organization intended the colony to Westernize Africa, combat the Atlantic slave trade, and create a cotton and molasses production economy underwritten by free labor to undermine slavery in the United States and the Caribbean. However, the majority of African Americans remained opposed to emigration programs like theirs.
Thomas John Jackson was an African-American former slave from Frederick County, Maryland, United States, who emigrated to Cape Palmas in the 19th century. Thomas Jackson was one of the most prominent early Americo-Liberian and was among the early American settlers of Liberia. Thomas Jackson is mentioned in the African Repository by the American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society.
The Colony of Liberia, later the Commonwealth of Liberia, was a private colony of the American Colonization Society (ACS) beginning in 1822. It became an independent nation—the Republic of Liberia—after declaring independence in 1847.
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